Leo africanus biography

Traveler

Sources

Spanish Muslim. Born al-Hassan ibn Muhammad al-Wizzaa al-Fasi, Leo Africanus was a native of Granada, Spain, and was educated in Morocco. As a young man he traveled all over North Africa and West Africa on trade and diplomatic missions with his father, visiting the Songhai Empire in

Italy. On the way home from a trip to Egypt, he was captured by Christian pirates, who gave him to Pope Leo X as a slave. Impressed with his slave’s intellectual abilities, the Pope set him free and in convinced him to convert to Christianity, baptizing him Johannis Leo (John Leo). The Pope also persuaded Leo to write an Italian account of his travels, which he completed in Published in as Descrittione dell”Africa (Description of Africa), the book became the most famous and most widely quoted European work about Africa. It remained the most important source of European knowledge about West and North Africa for the next four centuries. The name by which Leo is known today, Leo Africanus (Leo the African), stems from his reputation for writing the “definitive” European book on Africa. Through his descriptions, Europeans formed an image of Timbuktu as an exotic, mysterious, ancient, and inaccessible locale, making it the subject of fantasy and legend for years to come.

Sources

Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, 3 volumes, translated by John Pory, edited by Robert Brown (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, ).

Amin Maalouf, Leo Africanus, translated by Peter Sluglett (New York: Norton, ).

For the first English translation of his most influential work, The Description of Africa, he is John Leo. His baptismal name was Joannes Leone de Medici, although he preferred its Arabic form, Yuhannah al-Asad. His birth name was al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan. But he is best known as Leo Africanus.

His date of birth is unknown, but its place is not: Moorish Granada. It seems fitting that a great native historian of Africa – Muslim, Arabic-speaking – was born in Europe: he is a challenger of categories.

He grew up in Fez. Or rather, he grew up everywhere, travelling widely with his father, a diplomat. It was in that role himself that he was taken by pirates returning by sea from Egypt. Realising their prisoner’s value, they presented him to Pope Leo X, who baptised him in St Peter’s on 6 January  

Was al-Hasan’s conversion self-preservation or was it sincere? The man’s intelligence and resource look back at us blankly across the centuries.

It has been argued that al-Hasan returned to North Africa, and Islam, after the sack of Rome in But evidence is thin. For centuries, The Description was all the West knew of Africa, while its author remained elusive – melting into the foreground, to borrow a phrase from elsewhere.

Moroccan author (c. c. )

For the novel by Amin Maalouf, see Leo Africanus (novel).

Johannes Leo Africanus (born al-Hasan Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, Arabic: الحسن محمد الوزان الفاسي; c.&#; &#; c.&#;) was an Andalusi diplomat and author who is best known for his book Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica, later published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio as Descrittione dell'Africa (Description of Africa) in , centered on the geography of the Maghreb and Nile Valley. The book was regarded among his scholarly peers in Europe as the most authoritative treatise on the subject until the modern exploration of Africa. For this work, Leo became a household name among European geographers. He converted from Islam to Christianity and changed his name to Johannes Leo de Medicis (يوحنا الأسد). Leo possibly returned to North Africa in

Biography

Most of what is known about his life is gathered from autobiographical notes in his own work. Leo Africanus was born as al-Hasan, son of Muhammad in Granada around the year The year of birth can be estimated from his self-reported age at the time of various historical events. His family moved to Fez soon after his birth. In Fez he studied at the University of al-Qarawiyyin (also spelled al-Karaouine). As a young man he accompanied an uncle on a diplomatic mission, reaching as far as the city of Timbuktu (c.&#;), then part of the Songhai Empire. In when returning from a diplomatic mission to Constantinople on behalf of the Sultan of FezMuhammad II he found himself in the port of Rosetta during the Ottoman conq

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